Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 215

regularity in analyses of digital technology” (445). Kevin Kelly, cofounder
and former executive editor of Wired magazine, was not the irst, or the
last, when he declared in 2002 that “God is the Machine” in an article
exploring “the transcendent power of digital computation” (2002). The
emergence of the Internet sent gurus in search of its sublime origins and
several, including former vice president Al Gore, the novelist Tom Wolfe,
and web authorities like Erik Davis (1998) and Mark Dery (1996), found
it in the work of the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The United
Nations sponsored a conference on his work and, in a characteristic burst
of gushing enthusiasm, Wired magazine proclaimed that the Jesuit priest
“saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived” (Kreis-
berg 1995). Teilhard's work remains popular today, particularly for his
core concept of the noosphere , which he thought of as the mental space
surrounding the earth in an atmosphere of thought ( noos in ancient Greek
means mind), and which has even received a contemporary spelling as the
knowosphere (Revken 2012).
The Jesuit priest's work appeals to a sublime vision of transcendence
through knowledge. Speciically, as Teilhard describes it in his major
work The Phenomenon of Man (1961), in addition to the atmosphere sur-
rounding our earth and making life as we know it possible, we are also
encircled by a noosphere or sphere of thought that grows thicker and more
powerful with the world's accelerating production of information. As the
biologist and anthropologist David Sloan Wilson described, “As a new
evolutionary process, however, our origin was almost as momentous as
the origin of life. Teilhard called the human-created world the noosphere,
which slowly spread like a skin over the planet, like the biological skin (the
biosphere) that preceded it. He imagined 'grains of thought' coalescing
at ever-larger scales until they became a single global consciousness that
he called the Omega Point” (Revken 2012). For some early and current
cyber-enthusiasts, Teilhard's work reafirmed their commitment to prog-
ress through knowledge, to a vision of evolution that extended beyond
Darwin to the realm of pure thought, and to their belief that the informa-
tion age was more than a convenient marker for the latest step from the
agricultural and industrial stages of human development. In their view, it
was a watershed in human, organic, and cosmic evolution. More than a new
means of production, the computer and other information technologies
were keys to a posthuman world. Ours is not just an Age; it is a Mission.